But doing this tutorial makes me realize how little I still now about color and I probably made things wrong and those typos and askdkasd blah. But I hope this makes you think more about how color affects other colors in your works! And maybe not use gray to shade stuff. :U;;;

Ugh I need to lay down.

AND SORRY THE FILE SIZE IS HUUUGGEEE

Edit 8-17-12:::HOLY MOLY where did you all come from? I just woke up with over 1K feedback messages and I'm used to seeing less than 10! Aaaa thanks so much! ;; I'm so happy so many people found it useful.

So I went in and fixed some typos, reworded some things, etc, so it's all nice. C':

As for colored dry media: for colored pencils, I was taught in high school to use dark, cool colors along with the compliment color and dark brown as the base for shading. You'll need to experiment with this, since I haven't used it in a long time and I'm not sure how it'll turn out.

And the journey continues on!

Edit 8-21-12:::I... got a Daily Deviation for this?! Wow!! I... I don't think I deserve it but I feel so honored! I feel bad because I wish I could've explained things better in this and cleared things up that were misunderstood... but I'm glad this helped people! That made making this tutorial worth while!

Edit 8-25-12:::I just wanted to feature a tutorial by ~ArchAntoinette about this same topic. Before I give the link, I just wanted to point out that even though my tutorial was uploaded first and the format and photos are eerily similar, she touches upon things I didn't talk about, not to mention she's a very talented artist. Check it out! [link]

Daily Deviation

Given 2012-08-22

[Stock & Resources] The suggester states "I've always had trouble figuring out how my shading is supposed to look and every tutorial I look at seems to just say the same thing. This tutorial, however, showed me not only how, but why the shading looks like it does. Why shadows aren't gray by *RianaLD is amazing!" (
Suggested by Tristaeza and Featured by
Elandria)

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure about the first one. From the colors of this photograph, fav.me/d3gmik3, it would seem that the shadows are almost purple (red+blue sky = purplish shadows) and the highlights still seem orangy. I would go and expirience this on my own but I live in Los Angeles and autumn forests are difficult to find and study. This is something that's definitely on my to-do list!

As for the second question, no, I don't think so, unless the lamp happens to be as blue as the sky.

This is the most incredibly helpful thing I've seen while on this site. It goes so incredibly in-depth on the case of nothing but shadows, yet its something no one ever thinks about or comments on without this clarification. All of my life I've seen shadows as gray, even when they obviously weren't. I'd think, "Oh, it's bright out, that's why its blue/yellow/any other color" I've seen this, but I haven't SEEN it. This piece has completely changed my perspective on lighting, shadows, and my own art as a whole. I can't thank you enough for bringing this clarity to the population of dA.

I read this about two years ago I think, when I just started drawing and this was like gibberish to me. I managed to find this tutorial again and now everything makes a lot more sense. Thank you so much for sharing this, now I think I now where my impasse in improvement has been coming from. I shall definitely experiment with this immediately. Again, thank you so much for your contribution of this wonderfully enlightening tutorial, I cannot thank you enough.

Though I should mention that I think a couple things are not quite right, for example I'd give heavy qualifiers to the idea 'warm lightsource/cool shadows' and 'cool light source/warm shadows' -- as you mentioned, it's not always the case. And as you sort of imply, the reason is partly about reflected light (it happens to be the case that in common situations the parts that are not the light source are the opposite, like the sun/sky example), but also often because of simultaneous contrast (in such cases, the shadows aren't actually coloured, and if you painted them as coloured you'd be exaggerating the effect more than is strictly realistic).

Wonderful! Finally, someone on DA has explained it! I'm in the process of making my own tutorial/ebook, with inspiration from Gurney and based largely on the Dimensions of Colour (fantastic site, by the way -- it fills in all the technicals and explains more of the lower-level why and how than Gurney's, plus some of the history of common misconceptions about colour that exist today. Bit heavy-going, but well worth it).

Your tut is well explained, great examples, nicely laid out, and practical. *applause*

IT'S ABOUT TIME SOMEONE EXPLAINED THIS TO ME!! Honestly, every MS Paint tutorial I've been on talks about how shadows aren't just a darker shade than the base, but they never really explain why. So, thank you for this. I somewhat understand now.